After a successful meetup at the Six Mile, let's schedule another one.

We had our first meeting on Sunday November 6. Rafael Zambrana, Ed Nelson, and myself (Jason Grenier), attended and the meetup went well. A few of the highlights are:

1) Need to think about ways to reach out to people and network. Decided to create a Facebook page. We have to decide on a name for the page. One suggestion is "d@w-Victoria", because that is how it is listed on the Democracy at Work webpage. We can discuss other names.

2) We came to the conclusion that not everyone who joins our group will be interested in starting a WSDE; the purpose of d@w-Groups is to connect with others locally who want to support and promote coops, too.

3) Starting a business is never easy and always time consuming! Best to consult with others involved to get a sense of time and financial commitment that everyone can afford.

4) It's not easy to work together with other people, because it demands a certain level of personal maturity to put ourselves in other people's shoes, and share the responsibilities as much as the rights that we achieve working together.

Let's continue this conversation at our next meeting at the Victoria Library. I picked a different date and time in hopes it is more convenient to more people.

Anyone interested in meeting with the owner of WildFire bakery, which intended on becoming a Workers' Self Directed Co-op in year 2000, but ended up becoming a family owned restaurant? Apparently, it is a bit of a story. We would have to meet between 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. during the week.

We're about:

This meetup group is for those who are looking for a positive way to promote democratic workplaces in the Victoria/Vancouver community. Many of us work in top-down-hierarchical organizations where decisions are made by a few people at the very top (CEOs and shareholders), who make decisions that affect the majority of workers at the bottom. We say we live in a democracy in Canada, but if we spend most of our time at our jobs we should want them to be democratic, too. This is why this meetup group was created: to discuss these issues and promote the concept of democratic workplaces like worker cooperatives and Workers Self-Directed Enterprises.

The type of democratic workplaces we will focus on is unlike any coop you may be familiar with: it is not something like Mountain Equipment Co-op, or the Co-op gas station. They are workplaces where the workers of a company own the company themselves, and make all the decisions about the company: what to produce, where to produce, what to do with the profits? They are democratic institutions, where the workers decide whether or not to produce something that pollutes the environment, move the company to another country, and/or give all the profits to a CEO or Board of Directors. Democratic workplaces like a Workers Self-Directed Enterprise may be less likely to pollute the environment, because the workers live in the community where the pollution takes place (it is them and their families that have to breath the air, drink the water, and eat the food). Workers Self-Directed Enterprises are less likely to move their company to another country, because they would be putting themselves out of a job. Finally, the profits of a company are more likely to spread equally amongst the workers who use their brains and muscle to produce the product or service - not a CEO or Board of Directors who offer little to no value to the company.

For more information on this subject, please watch professor Richard Wolff’s explanation of Workers Self-Directed Enterprises at the following link:

Democratic workplaces like Workers Self-Directed Enterprises are a cure for the economic problems we face today. This meetup up group is to discuss this topic and, if the interest is there, use our skills to start such a workplace. Join us!